New tools to improve geographical literacy in Hungary

Abstract

<p>Nowadays, Hungarian Geography education has been facing lots of challenges, one of which is the necessity of improving geographical literacy. Recent PISA results show that Hungarian students’ reading comprehension level and strategies need substantial improvement as without proper reading skills, students are less likely and able to have a meaningful understanding of different types of texts, including geographical ones. Geography classes offer a good opportunity to improve students’ literacy, however, teachers usually lack new types of educational tools that they could use to help improve their pupils’ geographical literacy.</p><p>The MTA-SZTE Research Group of Geography Teaching and Learning aims at developing an activity-based workbook concentrating on the geography of Hungary. The workbook consists of separate worksheets, all of which are designed to employ a variety of activities. One of the key concepts of this new type of workbook is to enhance the geographical literacy of students, and to provide both students and teachers with more authentic geographical exercises that can be fitted to the needs of both individual students and classes or groups.</p><p>Activities concentrating on the improvement of geographical literacy are various. First, different types of texts, with varying length, are used, such as postcard captions, blogs, newspaper articles, research studies; and by using more authentic texts, students are likely to learn diverse reading strategies when solving the excercises.  Second, the type of activities connected to the texts are also diverse, including gap-filling exercises, finding information, preparing SWOT analyses, action plans, figures, etc. Third, the activities are linked to different geographical problems that are present in selected Hungarian landscapes, towns or villages, micro- and mesoregions.</p><p>In order to evaluate the efficiency of the worksheets developed by our research group, we carried out a quasi-experimental, pre- and post-test-design study with the participation of the schools associated with the research group. Both the pre- and the post-tests contained two new types of reading comprehension exercises to measure whether using the excercises of the worksheets help to improve students’ reading comprehension level. Preliminary results show that the members of the experimental groups significantly outperform the achievement of the members of the control groups. Our results imply that the experimental worksheets developed by our research group enhance the reading comprehension level of students, therefore, they help to improve students’ geographical literacy.</p><p> </p><p>This work has been supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under Grant “MTA Tantárgypedagógiai Kutatási Program (2016–2020)”.</p>

Diagnosis of learning difficulties of plate tectonics concepts among secondary school students using: Focus group, nominal group, and questionnaire

“…According to several research studies in science didactics, students have misconceptions about geological phenomena and encounter difficulties in assimilating and understanding concepts related to plate tectonics [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24]. These misconceptions impede learning and are fundamental challenges to "constructivist" scientific teaching [25].…”